"No doubt bias and error are important concerns in strategic decision-making. Yet it seems quite a stretch to suggest that the original strategies developed by people like Apple’s Steve Jobs, Starbucks’ Howard Schultz, or even Walmart’s Sam Walton had much to do with error-free calculations based on big data. Their strategies, like most breakthrough strategies, emerged in settings with remarkably little data to process and little basis for calculation — situations in which the paths to value creation were highly uncertain and evidence was sparse. We are highly skeptical that debiasing decision making, eradicating errors, or ceding strategy to AI will improve strategizing, let alone lead to breakthrough strategies. [Moi ici: Pensamento bacteriologicamente puro, sem erros, totalmente justificável e matematizável é o da triade, dos encalhados. E perder o pé? E o optimismo não documentado? Valor não se calcula numa folha de cálculo, é um sentimento]
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Composing valuable strategies requires seeing the world in new and unique ways. It requires asking novel questions that prompt fresh insight. Even the most sophisticated, deep-learning-enhanced computers or algorithms simply cannot generate such an outlook. But where does the uniqueness and novelty so essential to innovative strategic thinking come from? It comes from contrarian, perhaps even “distorted,” perceptions and beliefs about reality and the “facts” that surround us.
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If everyone believes the same thing — or if everyone uses the same variables, information, and computational tools — the logical result is computational consistency, shared conclusions, and me-too strategies.
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In setting strategy, deviation in judgment is a feature, not a bug.
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It is tempting to believe that the right evidence and the right analysis will yield the right strategy. But just as customer surveys seldom lead to breakthrough products that capture the imagination of customers and markets, substantive strategy-making requires that we see well beyond the available data.
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We view the strategist’s task as akin to an inkblot test, where participants are presented with highly ambiguous evidence and signals that afford many possible realities, but offer no single correct answer. With such tests, the very same evidence — an ambiguous picture or set of marks — can be interpreted correctly in many different ways.
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Valuable strategizing demands this novel perception — an ability to see in ambiguous cues and data what others can’t see. Strategic thinking is fueled by the novelty of our observation, not its consistency. [Moi ici: Lembram-se do Serginho Centeno ou do André e as suas previsões do calçado, assentes em big data?] The object of strategic thinking is not to ensure that we all observe the same information and derive the same conclusion. It is precisely the opposite: If your desire is to be a value creator, you must aspire to see what others cannot."
"Why are some companies more productive than others? And why do certain divisions within those companies perform better than others do? Research has shown that top performers tend to invest more in research and development, adopt better technology, and employ a more educated workforce. [Moi ici: Poderíamos resumir, depois do que temos lido de Felin e Zenger que "Top performers haver better theories"]
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Nicholas A. Bloom [Moi ici: Um velho conhecido deste blogue] ... found that management practices accounted for about one-fifth of the variation in productivity among plants. Management style had the same effect as R&D spending — and twice the impact of technology spending — in explaining productivity differences.
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“There’s an overwhelmingly strong relationship between structured management and performance,” Bloom says.
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The researchers found that plants where managers carefully monitored the manufacturing process, production targets, and employee performance, and used that data to inform decisions, were more successful. Plants where leaders infrequently reviewed performance indicators and targets, and promoted employees based on tenure or connections rather than achievement, fared worse. These links remained strong after controlling for workers’ education level, the age of the plant and firm, and a wide range of other factors. Plants with more structured management performed better than other sites within the same firm, and plants that adopted more of these strategies saw their performance improve over time.
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One takeaway of the study was just how differently plants are managed, even within the same state or industry. In fact, 40% of the total difference in productivity was among plants within the same firm. [Moi ici: Algo sobre o qual escrevemos aqui há milhares de anos] That means that the attributes of a CEO, corporate governance, and company ownership can’t easily explain a large share of the differences in management practices.
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“It’s astounding,” Bloom says. “Some managers monitor huge amounts of data, and others seem to operate entirely by gut instinct.” [Moi ici: Uma classificação que quem anda no terreno nunca faria, é o pão nosso de cada dia]
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“You would think all firms would be well-managed and doing the right thing, but they’re not,” Bloom says. “I guess firms are like people — we all have our faults.” [Moi ici: Come on Bloom, esperava que já estivesses mais calejado nestas cenas]"
"Num mundo sem patentes... tudo é acelerado.
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A única forma de uma empresa se manter à tona é nunca parar, é estar sempre à frente da onda."
"The theory-based view has equally important implications for understanding the markets that surround organizations. While economics has traditionally focused on asymmetric information, idiosyncratic history, and bounded rationality to explain the heterogeneous outcomes that play out in markets, we anchor on divergent theories held by economic actors. ... “into the sentiments and minds of the actors” ... “a theory of people with theories”. Our assumption of an economy with a multitude of economic actors who possess potentially divergent theories of value has important implications for how we understand the economics and very nature of markets—both the markets through which theories are pursued and the markets through which theories are funded.Trechos retirados de "The Theory-Based View: Economic Actors as Theorists" de Teppo Felin e Todd R. Zenger, publicado por Strategy Science Vol. 2, No. 4, Dezembro 2017, pp. 258–271.
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there is nothing inherent to assets or objects that allows us to conclusively delineate all possible uses, though efficient markets hypotheses make precisely this assumption. Furthermore, any number of assets and objects in the world are scarcely even priced, thus simply waiting for the right theory to provide them with use, relevance, and meaning. From the perspective of the theory-based view, the idea of any form of efficiency or full rationality in the use of resources or assets in an economy is a fiction, perhaps only applicable for some cases of pure competition.
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The domain of strategy fundamentally is concerned with novel, unanticipated, and hidden sources of value, which we argue are unlocked through firm-specific theories. Naturally there might be hindrances in the emergence of novelty and heterogeneity. Humans naturally fixate on those functions and uses of objects that are common, which indeed creates discrepancies and opportunities in markets, which in turn readily allow savvy entrepreneurs with novel theories to find bargains and new uses.
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the theory-based view highlights that economic actors in markets compete for resources on the basis of the theories they possess. This competition is driven by different visions of the future, and has an important social component.
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in our interactions with entrepreneurs, executives, and firms we ask the following questions:
- What do you believe that no one else believes? Why?
- What specifically is your firm’s theory of value? How is that different from others? If your theory is so unique, then what specific assets would you say are underpriced (or even unpriced)?
- Is your theory of value novel, simple, and elegant? Is it falsifiable? Does it rule out some experiments and point toward others? Is it generalizable and generative?
- What problem is no one solving? Or put differently, what problems do you (or others) need to solve to realize your vision of the future? How will you solve these problems?
- Who do you need to convince (or incentivize) for your theory to be realized?
- What funding and governance mechanisms will best enable you to realize your theory?"
"Most of the breakthrough discoveries and remarkable inventions throughout history, from flints for starting a fire to self-driving cars, have something in common: They are the result of curiosity. The impulse to seek new information and experiences and explore novel possibilities is a basic human attribute. New research points to three important insights about curiosity as it relates to business. First, curiosity is much more important to an enterprise’s performance than was previously thought.Trechos retirados de "Why Curiosity Matters"
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Second, by making small changes to the design of their organizations and the ways they manage their employees, leaders can encourage curiosity—and improve their companies.
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Third, although leaders might say they treasure inquisitive minds, in fact most stifle curiosity, fearing it will increase risk and inefficiency. [Moi ici: Aumentar a eficiência passa por reduzir a variabilidade. É a cozinha do McDonald's, experiências não são permitidas - execução, execução, execução]
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My own research confirms that encouraging people to be curious generates workplace improvements.
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Twice a week for four weeks, half of them received a text message at the start of their workday that read, “What is one topic or activity you are curious about today? What is one thing you usually take for granted that you want to ask about? Please make sure you ask a few ‘Why questions’ as you engage in your work throughout the day. Please set aside a few minutes to identify how you’ll approach your work today with these questions in mind.”"
"Better theories explain and predict more with less. For the same reason that one-to-one maps of reality are useless, valuable theories must be parsimonious and simple.
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From the perspective of cognition and perception, we know that humans similarly miss all manner of “obvious” things in their environments—including sources of value— in our immediate visual scenes, unless they are asking the right questions, or are armed with the right problem, or are operating with the right theories.
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[Moi ici: O trecho que se segue fez-me logo lembrar o truque que aprendi com Roger Martin, o de negar uma estratégia e ver se o inverso é estúpido. Este trecho também faz pensar em Porter quando este afirma que é tão importante o que uma estratégia implica não fazer como o que implica fazer. Por fim, faz lembrar também as estratégias híbridas e as puras] As Popper notes: “Every ‘good’ theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.” Of course, scientists are interested in verifying and falsifying theories for the sake of advancing knowledge, but economic theorists are interested in creating value by pursuing strategic actions consistent with their theories, while avoiding those that don’t. The virtue of a falsifiable economic theory is that it provides clear prescriptions about what strategic experiments or actions are consistent with the theory and thus worth taking up and which are not."
"As with scientific theories, an economic theory commonly originates with a question or problem, either one widely recognized or one entirely unseen by others. Such problems or questions may prompt a novel hypothesis or conjecture about paths to a solution, and lead to experimentation. Through further refinements, partly informed by experimental actions, the problem becomes more fully framed, and a more well-formulated theory may emerge.
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Valuable theories—whether scientific ones or economic theories of value—perform several key sight-giving functions. By effectively framing a problem or a set of problems, a theory provides a coherent, abstract, causal representation of the world. It serves not as a (or the) representation of the world, per se, but rather as a map of what might be observed: a way of seeing things that may not be evident or obvious to others. A theory provides predictions about observations, future states, and the emergence or dynamics of the problem. A theory permits counterfactual inference, allowing an economic actor to infer what might happen in response to a given action, and it allows the interpretation of evidence obtained from that action.
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Valuable theories require a contrarian belief....
However, in the economic context, if a view or theory is commonly held by others, then it is logically unable to yield new insights about novel uses of resources, novel observations, and sources of opportunity. Thus, valuable economic theories must “go against the tide” of common opinion, facts, and wisdom, and thereby permit vision that others lack. Novel theories are essentially bets against “the market” or bets against common understandings about what might be valuable. [Moi ici: Foi aqui que escrevi a tal nota sobre a galeria de cromos, Zapatero e os cemitérios]
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A valuable economic theory, then, frames a problem and encapsulates a novel belief about a possible future in which that problem is solved. It prompts a theory-guided search for resources and solutions to then solve it and create that future. A firm with a theory, therefore, attends to its environment with a specific lens—with the aforementioned Suchbild in mind (a set of questions and problems)—for which it seeks solutions. Moreover, there is an inherent back-and-forth or toggling between beliefs or theories and questions or problems. Beliefs reveal problems, which, as they become better framed, emerge as theories and hypotheses. Alternatively, initial problems may generate conjectures, which generate new problems and questions that ultimately lead to a well-composed theory."
"The lesson for managers? Don’t confuse your sense of the company’s identity with your customers’ sense of your brands’ identities. If you do, you’ll only spread your own confusion."Faz-me recuar no tempo:
"Interestingly, companies that are expert in branding are usually comfortable with managing the brands separately. Executives at P&G, for instance, have a very strong sense of corporate identity even while they manage a huge portfolio of standalone branded businesses – and with multiple brands in each segment."Julgo que a maioria dos decisores por fusão ou eliminação de marcas não percebem que os clientes são heterogéneos e valorizam diferentes propostas de valor. Como só pensam em reduzir custos, passam ao lado de um instrumento de marketing que podia ser utilizado de forma interessante aqui em Mongo.
"In this paper we focus instead on economic actors’ capacity to theorize, just like scientists, and argue that the theories actors generate animate markets and reveal paths to value creation.
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To address the limitations of an omniscient and efficient view of markets, strategy scholars have postulated several alternative value-generating paths to heterogeneity. Two seem particularly salient for our purposes. First, heterogeneity may reflect a firm’s initial resource endowment that results from luck or the firm’s unique history. These initial endowments provide a source of difference and latent possibility and a vehicle for building capabilities over time. Second, heterogeneity may result from cognitive limitations and behavioral failures. The fact that the rationality of some market actors “falls short of omniscience” creates heterogeneity and opportunities. Economic actors neither act rationally nor omnisciently when purchasing assets and making economic decisions — because of cognitive bounds and the limits of human information processing — which in turn leads to heterogeneity. In short, the suboptimal decisions of some economic actors open up the possibility for creating and finding value.
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While the two above sources of heterogeneity provide useful explanations, we suggest an alternative path, one that emphasizes the human capacity to ask novel questions, frame novel problems, and compose novel theories.
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Whether in the realm of scientific discovery or economic value creation, theories guide perception and observation—they shape what we see. As simply put by Einstein, “whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use”. In other words, without questions and theories, things in our environment—even obvious ones— often remain hidden and outside our awareness. Our physical reality and environment has a large if not infinite variety of features, characteristics, and possibilities that remain latent or dormant. However, theories provide a mechanism that allows for salience and unique observation. Novel theories, sparked by novel questions and novel problem frames, allowus to see, look for, and express that which may previously have escaped awareness. And importantly, the reinterpretation of even mundane objects, events, occurrences, or readily visible factors may take on completely new meaning and insight in light of the novel theories we possess.
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Economic theories of value, as held by entrepreneurs and managers, are no different in shaping what is observed. These theories, as animated by questions and problems, provide the underlying instruments and vehicles for identifying previously unseen sources of value. [Moi ici: Recordo aqui o caso do burel e outros] They reveal new possible uses and functions— called “affordances”—for common objects and new combinations. While traditional approaches to markets focus on prices and the informational content that price might provide, economic actors with theories and opinions—as we will discuss and illustrate—can identify sources of value in unpriced factors or identify unpriced value by identifying new uses and affordances for assets.
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Perception scholars have persuasively shown that there is no way to exhaustively capture or represent a visual scene or environment. Any visual scene has a massive number of features and characteristics that could be attended to, and thus we necessarily attend to the world in more directed and focused fashion. Organisms—humans included—attend to their surroundings not in a computational or camera-like sense but rather through the questions, problems, hypotheses, and theories that they have in mind and impose on the world. Thus salience and observation, in terms of what we are aware of, are driven by theories and questions and not by the inherent characteristics (called “natural assessments” in the literature), presence or even nature of objects. This intuition, intriguingly, was featured in some of Simon’s early work, when he argued that “a subject perceives what he is ‘ready’ to perceive in it; the more complex and ambiguous the stimulus, the more the perception is determined by what is already ‘in’ the subject and less by what is in the stimulus”.
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Essential to our theory-based view, then, is the recognition that we attend to our surroundings and environment looking for something, rather than neutrally recording or scanning its contents. This “looking for” is different from comparison or calculation. Here salience and awareness are driven by the questions that we impose on the world, and the search for specific answers.
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Perception and observation are never neutral, or some kind of pure, mind- or organism-independent recording or capturing of what is objectively there, but rather “observation comes after expectation and hypothesis”. ... Thus, the mapping is from mind-to-world rather than world-to-mind.
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In sum, we argue that perception and observation do not happen based on the actual nature or characteristics of stimuli or objects themselves but rather it happens on the basis of the questions and theories that economic actors impose on situations and environments. This leaves the world poised for constant reinterpretation and possibility, as perception is not passive or automatic, but generative, though requiring a theory and “readiness to perceive”....Thus, we see theories within the context of economics and strategy as serving the same function as they do in human and scientific contexts as well. They are the human “Suchbild”—search or seek images— that direct our attention and awareness. Theories represent instruments for making previously unobserved facets in and of the environment more salient. And theories of economic value guide our awareness toward specific observations and factors that may readily have been missed by others and reveal potentially valuable assets and opportunities others overlook."
"Quem controla a prateleira, controla o acesso ao mercado, controla a relação com os clientes.Em Fevereiro de 2012 neste blogue escrevia-se:
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Se uma empresa produz um produto, mas não consegue chegar aos consumidores, esse produto e essa empresa não existem!"
"A única forma de fazer frente ao poder do dono da prateleira é seduzir aquele que manda no dono da prateleira, o consumidor!!!"Há dias em "The relationship with the customer" Seth Godin bate na mesma tecla:
"There are countless factories vying to sell generic products to the companies that own the customer relationship. Perhaps 90% (sometimes 100%) of the profit goes to companies that make the sale, not the ones who actually made the product.O que é que a sua PME faz para não ser excluída da mente de quem manda no dono da prateleira?
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That’s because while they make the thing, they don’t do the work. The hard part is earning attention and trust. The hard part is helping someone make the choice. (There’s a difference between the hard part and the important part. Without the factory, there’s nothing to sell. Making it is important. But increasingly, it’s not the hard part.)
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Either you’re doing the hard part or you’re left out of the transaction."
"Entretidos a distribuir, estes amigos parlamentares esqueceram-se de competir e não trouxeram nada de novo (e até, como na política de saúde, proibiram o que havia de inovador) a uma economia estagnada com uma população em processo de envelhecimento rápido e irreversível. Estes amigos ignoraram que a responsabilidade política é construir o futuro, não é distribuir o passado.
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Para sair desta armadilha precisa de assumir a necessidade do regime de rendimentos crescentes, desistindo da ilusão distributiva de tirar a uns para dar a outros - porque acabaremos todos sem nada, o que é o destino final dos regimes dos rendimentos decrescentes."
"A agricultura é a arte de produzir alimentos para a sociedade, [Moi ici: Estou farto de escrever aqui no blogue que a função do agricultor não é alimentar a sociedade, a função do agricultor é ganhar dinheiro através da prática da agricultura. A sociedade não quer saber dos agricultores, quer produtos agrícolas baratos nem que venham da Ucrânia. Por isso, o agricultor não deve ser trouxa e deve trabalhar para quem valoriza o fruto da sua actividade. Adiante] ocupando o território e fixando pessoas, que, através da sua actividade agrícola, mantêm os territórios limpos e ordenados, contribuindo para a manutenção da fauna e flora autóctones. [Moi ici: Sim, a começar pelos eucaliptos, não é?]
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Portugal é deficitário em carne, e nesse sentido deve apostar em equilibrar a sua balança comercial através do aumento da sua produção nacional.[Moi ici: Cuidado com a estratégia cancerosa, que destrói a joalharia]
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É com este tipo de medidas que iremos conseguir reduzir a nossa pegada carbónica, ao contrário do que nos tentam vender dizendo que a carne importada até é mais barata… e onde os custos ambientais já não são tidos em conta, como é o exemplo do recente acordo da UE com o Mercosul. A Fenapecuária é literalmente contra este acordo, considera mesmo que é um acordo desleal para com o sector e solicita a todos os partidos políticos que reflictam bem sobre o que está em causa.[Moi ici: Gente ao nível de um Nuno Melo e do seu grito contra os paquistaneses. A um produtor de carne eu aconselharia a subir na escala de valor, a fugir da concorrência pela quantidade e preço e que apostasse na joalharia]
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Os portugueses merecem saber que as condições e regras de produção não são as mesmas, os portugueses merecem saber que o sector pecuário nacional é moderno, respeita as regras ambientais, cumpre com o bem-estar animal,"[Moi ici: Indo por este caminho, alimentamos o discurso que legitima alguém na Alemanha, ou em França, dizer que a carne portuguesa é produzida em condições e regras de produção que não são as mesmas. O karma é lixado!]"
"Given the number of savers desperate to lend money to someone who offers a great return, why aren’t there more start-ups, VCs or large companies investing in productive projects? Aren’t there enough projects that produce a positive rate of return? The answer to this question is a depressing no. The low growth environment we have witnessed since 2005 tells us that something else is happening on the demand side. It’s not just a global saving glut; there is also a shortage of investment at the global level.E recordo "O padrão Mongo" de Dezembro de 2015.
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Companies holding record levels of cash or borrowing to fund share buybacks are both signs of a world short on good ideas and investment opportunities."
"While overseas fast fashion brands were quick to enter the Chinese market, they’ve had a hard time competing with local online retailers on websites like Tmall and Taobao. Chinese tastes have also shifted toward more elevated options, which offers an opportunity to high-end, fast fashion brands but hurts entry-level fast fashion. McKinsey & Company’s research suggests that more than 75 percent of China’s urban consumers will enter the middle-class bracket by 2022.
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“Chinese consumers have easy access to a variety of home-grown and affordable fashion brands online that pose a bigger challenge to brands like H&M and Zara,” says Ray Ju, the New York-based senior consultant of the global brand consultancy Labbrand. As this consumer steps into a new bracket, they are looking for new options that they can’t already find online: clothing with an affordable price point but with higher quality and design.
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Local customers have shown waning interest in fast fashion in recent years, complaining about bad quality and uncompetitive prices compared to local brands on Taobao."
"Opportunities are not just out there, ready to be plucked. Courses of action that can be superior often require proactive efforts to shape selection criteria for their potential to be expressed."Yesterday, during a morning walk I read "Crossing the chasm: Leadership nudges to help transition from strategy formulation to strategy implementation", from Alex Tawse, Vanessa M. Patrick, and Dusya Vera, and published by ScienceDirect. I think this article can be used as an introduction to the challenge of developing an approach to implement a strategy.
"The issue of crossing the chasm from planning to implementation is particularly germane to top managers and other business leaders who bear primary responsibility for strategy formulation and must engage in the implementation process for it to be successful.This reminds me why I use so many times this picture to joke about implementing a strategy:
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In this article, we argue that successful strategy implementation should stem from within the organization and needs to garner total organizational effort, including the leadership and active participation of top-level and mid-level managers."
